If you're having a specific problem that you want help with, or if you have a specific question, please start your own thread on this forum. This thread is intended for general feedback about how Adobe Media Encoder CS5 is working out for you.

I must say, with the change from CS4 to CS5, Adobe Media Encoder went from something I never touch, to one of my most used utilities. I must admit, with all respect to Adobe, CS4 AME just never worked for me. I ran every update I could find, and tried it on multiple machines. It just never did anything. I'd start an encode job, and it would just sit there spinning its wheels.

Fast forward to CS5, it's great. I do all of my Vimeo encoding for graymachine and Red Giant tutorials in AME, even going back and re-encoding some old ones to conform to Vimeo's HD spec (which AME conveniently eliminates a step for me by inserting the necessary black space to get 4:3 to 16:9 aspect.)

Cheers to Adobe for making an awesome and integrated encoder in the Adobe workflow.

Something very strange going on with the 5.0.1 update, or perhaps the most recent update of After effects. After applying the recent change AME is suddenly taking over 24 hours to render a three minute video in H.264/720p that usually would render in about an hour and a half on an 8 core Mac Pro. Activity monitor shows virtually no CPU utilization. The render bombs when the monitor goes into power save mode and video performance gets terrible, making me think that the ATI Radeon HD 5770 installed on this system is being tasked with all the rendering instead of the CPUs.

UPDATE, real-time (before this was posted): AME just got through rendering the After Effects sequence, and the esimated remaining is falling like a rock. Issue definitely appears related to after effects causing a bottleneck in the display adapter. Remainder of this render is moving quickly and CPU utilization is now in the 90% or more and the render is moving very fast.

It worked fine until I let Premiere update to 5.0.2.... After that, Premiere no longer starts Media Encoder when I press the QUEUE button. WIn7, 64bit. Adobe Support was absolutely NO HELP! Instead, of accepting that there is an issue with the update installer, they insisted that I had to install CS 5 on the C: drive for the "new" server-based update process to work.

So, it's a known bug, but the workaround is relatively painless. Let us know whether it works for you.

BTW, before you make general statements about Adobe support, please consider that one bad phone call doesn't mean that we're all bad. (I'm in Technical Support, and I hope that you don't think that I'm "no help".)

This wasn't JUST one call.... I spent 4 evenings on the phone with tech support, and got nowhere.

Too bad that phone support couldn't suggest instead of insisting that my only option was to restructure all my drive partitions so that Premiere could be installed on the C: drive. One of them even suggested that I get another hard drive so that the C: drive could be made larger. One of them also insisted that I was the only person he'd heard of who chose to install Premiere on a drive other than C:. By the time I finally ended the call, I'd reached my wit's end, and was ready to trash the product even though I actually like it's GUI and performance. (I've been using Premiere/Encore since version 6.0.)

Now, since it's a known issue, are there any plans to actually fix it?

Glad I checked this forum. I too was suffering from this symptom. Premiere CS5 would not add to the AME queue after the latest update. The short cut worked.

FYI: I have Windows 7 64 bit on a SSD which is only 60GB and all my apps are on the E drive. (Adobe CS5 installer still put 5GB on the C Drive).

I too have been going back and forth with tech support by email but there was no solution. I reinstalled, sent a project file etc all over the course of the last 4 to 5 days. I can appreciate that this is a new problem but I would think that some of the symptoms I stated ... "Premiere CS5 can't add to Adobe Media Encoder CS5 queue after most recent updates" ... would have led me to this work around quicker.

Media Encoder is working fine, but I have run across a Microsoft thingy. I am trying to embed a video in a PowerPoint 2010 64bit presentation. It won't take any of my videos, no matter how I compress them. It keeps asking for a 64 bit codec.

Does Media Encoder come with any "64 bit codecs"? Do you have any recommendations?

When I was running the trial of Web Premium, it worked great. After I purchased the product (an upgrade from Design Premium CS3) it stopped working. I can provide details if you'd like, but I also have an official support reference number, since I spent more time with technical support on the phone than I'd care to try to estimate (or think about). The case was resolved temporarily after I went through the CS5 uninstall and preference/system file "colonoscopy" then the subsequent reinstallation and reconfiguration of application preferences and so forth. Once again, I'm back to square one somehow and the application is running pretty terribly, if it runs at all. More frustrating still, is the fact that the only information that appears to be showing up in Adobe site searches or re-directs from google searches, is the page for live encoder, or whatever it's called. Has media encoder become Adobe's extramarital love child, that's been shipped off to save face and preserve the family name?

Sorry if this comes across as unnecessarily "hot and spicy", but my experience, fortunately only with this piece of the CS5 purchase, has left a bad taste in my mouth and I suppose, in all fairness, I'm just answering the question honestly. That said, if there is some way to get some technical assistance with someone who can do more than tell me to delete everything then re-install the suite, I would be grateful.

I love that I can send compositions/timelines to AME from AE and premiere as it enables me to work while rendering. Fantastic! Also, the crashes I experienced in previous versions seem to have vanished, no doubt due to the 64bit upgrade and better memory management.

Things I still think are missing:

Fine control over H264 parameters a la Handbrake; in fact, many codecs (including MPEG-2) are missing that extra level of control. Don't get me wrong, I don't have an issue with the end result; I'd just like a few more options for those very tricky fast moving shots.

Also, it appears that in order to convert from an anamorphic format to something in with a PAR of 1:1, I have to import and set up a timeline in premiere then import that into AME and render to the desired output. Not a deal breaker, but a difficult thing to explain to non-techie co-workers. No doubt there's an interpret footage trick that I'm missing..?

EDIT: yep, I just tried long clicking/right clicking on the footage in question, and I was greeted with an interpret footage option. How logicial!

Overall, it's a dream to use and does exactly what it should do. The whole of CS5 Production Premium is a credit to Adobe - well done!

First of all IT IS GREAT and I use it a lot I also used the CS4 version before!

But I have to report two issues about version CS5:

1. I bought the English version of the production premium CS5 but I have a German operating system (win7 64bit) all other adobe application are in English except Adobe Media Encoder it shows up in German language! Not a show stopper but should be fixed.

2. Recently I wanted to encode a video into an h264. I made some custom settings for that and the encoded video played very stuttered in Microsoft Media Player 12 (like 12fps instead of 25fps [settings were set correct in AME]) but fine in Quicktime and VLC Player (execpt for the gamma bug but that's an other story...)

I did a lot of testings and found the issue! Sometimes when you change a lot of the h264 settings (don't know when it happens exactly) Media Encoder seems to not set the fps correctly allthough AME shows 25fps in it's settings this setting is not encoded into the final file!

Quicktime and VLC seems not to care about the missing information but Windows Media Player gets confused.

It does not happens when using a preset in AME it only happens when changing a lot and using custom settings!

You can see the missing fps setting when right clicking the encoded file and choose properties (german:Eigenschaften) switch the tap to Details and there is no fps setting in the stuttering files but when encoded with a preset in AME there is the correct 25fps setting!

I have attached a screenshots to demonstrate it:

My workaround so far was to choose a preset with 25fps and close to my desired settings and change as few as possible - Fingers crosses and with a chance of 3/4 I was able to encode a working file containing the fps setting in it which plays perfect in Microsoft Media Player!

I hope you take a look into this issue because if you have a long file and you have to encode it again because it fails....... uiuiui

I'm running into a strange problem where the same parameters that I used in CS3 now result in exported files an order of magnitude larger in size. I used to create time lapses from individual 1080X1920 images using the quicktime format with custom settings to include the H.264 codec, 30 frames/sec progressive mode and a quality setting around 67%. For a 30 sec video, my filesize went from ~50mb to >500mb. Even dropping the frame size to a standard 720x480 setting, I still get > 160mb filesize. This problem didn't go away even after updating all production suite programs just today.

Not well... I can't seem to convert my MPEG files to FLV without the duration growing exponentially. When I select to convert a (00:07) MPEG to a FLV file the encoder stretches the clip from (00:07) to (02:59:09). How on God's green Earth do I change the "Duration of the Output File" to match the source file???? I've searched for solutions for 3 hours now to no avail.

It was not working very well for me at first. A 10 Min. 1920 x 1080 AVI was taking 18 + Hours to render to a FLV. I spend days reading these forms and looking online for a solution. Finally someone mentioned a Codec version issue. I had K-lite codec pack install both 32 bit and 64 bit. Un-installed both and now the same video takes 1.27 minutes to render. I am running a computer I built myself with a Asus Striker II Mob. 8GB Ram. Q9450 processor, NVidia Quadro FX 1700, 2-1T HDD RAID 0 Windows Vista Ultimate. I was just about to start building a new computer thinking the video card and processor were just not fast enough. I just wanted to post this just incase someone else is having trouble with AME running slow. By the way I tried it on AME CS4 it gave me an estimated run time of over 89 hours now it is telling me 4+ hours big difference.

Mostly bad. Although in theory sounds like a great product the reality for me is that it's highly unreliable, sometimes works like a charm and most of the time just hangs.

I've noticed that it works a lot better when sending sequences from Premiere Pro, than pulling compositions from After Effects, this past few days I've been trying to render a couple sequences and then have them automatically upload to their correspondent FTP destinations, only to find the next morning that it almost always fails to connect to the ftp servers, so the other day I rendered a small test file and right after it finished rendering and was supposed to begin the uploading it just skipped it, got a yellow warning symbol and the log reported AMe failed to connect to the server. It didn't even tried!!!

Sometimes it hangs when about to load an After Effects project, right before showing the available compositions. Some others hang when establishing a connection to Dynamic Link and some others when loading the xmp files or information. Bottom line: It fails A LOT.

If this program worked as it's supposed to it would be the category leader, no doubt.